By The FirstFlorida Governor Ron DeSantis rejected a request from the White House this week to deploy the National Guard to protect DC during Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
In a similar rebuke, Senator Marco Rubio will boycott the speech.
“Last week, the Biden administration requested the assistance of state national guards to deploy to Washington, D.C. I have rejected this request — there will be no @FLGuard sent to D.C. for Biden’s State of the Union,” DeSantis confirmed on social media.
“I’ll watch the replays on television. I don’t need to sit there and go through all of that just to make them feel good about how safe they’re being. Honestly, I’m just tired of all the COVID theater crap,” said Rubio said last week.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended the administration’s decision to ease covid mask guidelines 24 hours before the President’s address.
“I would say the president is very powerful, but he couldn’t make us be in the green zone that we’re in right now in D.C. That’s why we are not required — we’re not going to be required to wear a mask starting tomorrow,” Psaki said.
“So I would say that for him, it had nothing to do with the timing around the State of the Union. He wanted to give the CDC the time to assess and make recommendations that would be clear to the American public about what their recommendations would be for mask wearing moving forward.”
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